There's a significant value in being able to use a phone with a sense of freedom from being watched by a company like Google. To fully use an Android handset, you have to keep Google updated on your location, contacts, calendar, and email, and give them your credit card details. This information is much more sensitive because you are giving it to a company which can combine it with other sources of information.

The usefulness and game-changing property of the compatibility to me is that you can buy a phone from a small startup with its own operating system and UI and still have access to applications while you wait fot the number of phones to grow and for Skype et. al to port their stuff to the native environment. Without that you wouldn't necessary buy the phone and the conpany would have a much harder time to succeeed,

Also it is good to have a way to run more exotic apps that it does not make sense to port to a less mainstream environment.

I'm Finnish and has used Nokia Communicators since the 90s and my previous phones was an N9 and a N900 so the main attraction is the native environment as a continuation of Mameo/Meego and the company itself. Thankfully there is still some Finnish companies who seems to understand how to apply 'Management by perkele' :-)

Perkele is a word that does not get used enough on HN :)

I suggest that most Android phones don't run Android apps without significant problems, since most Android phones are cheap devices with bad screens, low memory and slow processors. And most developers instead have the latest and greatest.

Most Android phones are not Samsung 4 or HTC one.